Introduction

My name is Durk van der Meer(1978), digital artist from Groningen, the Netherlands. Started out in architectural visualization and currently working in VR as a level designer, where Unity is my main tool.

Concept

The idea was to create a kind of Fishertown where the neon element would be mostly visible at night. Perhaps they would have some type of bioluminescent paint, extracted from the sealife (e.g., algae). I took some inspiration from other things, including Moebius and japanese art that I thought could work in combination with this idea.

Process

Assets

I created the main assets for the town. I used Substance Painter to paint the materials. The Neon Symbols I took from the Voynich manuscript.

I created some smaller assets that I could scatter around the town.

Before I started with the terrain I also created some large rocks (and a large antenna)

Landscaping

For the landscape I used Gaia, which I really like for doing terrains. Especially the stamp tool and the texture spawner. It can change the textures based on height and angle. I took some of those terrain textures and tweaked the colors to yellow and blue.

Foliage

For the foliage I took the Hero Tree Package and the Desktop Grass Package, and changed the shape of some sample trees until they started to look a little more alien. For this you need to have the SpeedTree Modeler. I also changed the texture colors on the trees and the grass, and I also increased the random colorvariation on the trees. If your tree is primarily blue and the hue color orange for example, it will produce a lot different colors.

Creatures

I added some birds and some crabs. For the birds I added some landingspots on the roofs. The crabs I got moving by using Emerald AI. I didn't have a lot of time to figure it out but luckily it works pretty well in creating some random movement. I didn't have to time figure out how to make the crabs go sideways, but maybe the crabs have evolved :)

There are some human characters, but they are not very visible. I took ethan (unity character) and used mixamo to autorig and animate them. But in the end I decided to focus less on them.

Effects

For the clouds and the fog I used Fog Volume. The smoke effect came from the Unity Particle Pack and the water is the basic Unity water.

As for as Post Effects, I used the basic effects (AO, Bloom, DOF, Colorgrading, Grain, Vignetting, Antialiasing) and created a custom LUT. (based on the filmstock LUT in photoshop)

Timeline

I used timeline mainly to animate cameras, but looking forward to using it more in the future. I'm also working on VR diorama where Timeline will be very helpfull.

Cinemachine

Working with cinemachine was a blast! It adds a lot of life to a scene with movement that seems very natural and human.

What was also great, is the fact that when editing in your timeline and going from one scene to another, the audio stereo image is also adjusted. I it might be totally obvious that that's how it works, but to me it was pretty amazing to work like that, and get this direct feedback. It really immerses you in the scene. Normally working in VR, I think this might be usefull when editing a VR scene on a screen.

Since I rendered out image sequences, I couldn't capture the audio. I thought about rendering a video in a small size and then capturing audio with that, but I didn't have time.